Ransomware Damage Hit $11.5B in 2019

A new report shows the scale of ransomware's harm and the growth of that damage year-over-year -- an average of $141,000 per incident.

No one questions that a ransomware attack is a bad thing. But a new report doesn't just confirm that these encryption assaults are bad, it also quantifies the $11.5 billion in damage that ransomware did in 2019 alone.

According to the report from Deep Instinct, ransomware attacks became more focused in 2019, going after organizations rather than individuals. Drawn from a variety of external sources along with Deep Instinct's own network intelligence, the report contains device-specific analysis along with market-wide statistics like the $11.5 billion number it cites from Cybersecurity Ventures. The analysis generated by the multi-source data mashup shows that it's not just any organization that's coming under attack; those with critical infrastructure, life-or-death consequences, or thousands of citizens depending on their services were the most frequently targeted.

The "Cyber Threat Landscape Report" ascribes the shift in ransomware target to the rise of the non-state, financially focused attacker: criminal, in other words. This rise can also be seen in the dramatic increase in rentable malware droppers like Emotet that can be hired to deliver malware of virtually any kind to targeted systems.

As a result of the targeted attacks' success, the average cost of a ransomware attack in 2019 was estimated at $141,000, up from $46,800 one year earlier. Sodinokibi, which appeared in the wild concurrently with the end of the GandCrab network, was the leading ransomware version of 2019, responsible for attacks such as the one that hit 22 municipalities.

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